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Groundhog Day in the Application Security World

By Kate Pearce, a Security Consultant and Researcher at Neohapsis

Throughout the US on Groundhog Day, an inordinate amount of media attention will be given to small furry creatures and whether or not they emerge into bright sunlight or cloudy skies. In a tradition that may seem rather topsy-turvy to those not familiar with it, the story says that if the groundhog sees his shadow (indicating the sun is shining), he returns to his hole to sleep for six more weeks and avoid the winter weather that is to come.

Similarly, when a company comes into the world of security and begins to endure the glare of security testing, the shadow of what they find can be enough to send them back into hiding. However, with the right preparation and mindset, businesses can not only withstand the sight of insecurity, they can begin to make meaningful and incremental improvements to ensure that the next time they face the sun the shadow is far less intimidating.

Hundreds or thousands of issues – Why?

It is not uncommon for a Neohapsis consultant to find hundreds of potential issues to sort through when assessing a legacy application or website for the first time. This can be due to a number of reasons, but the most prominent are:

Security tools that are paranoid/badly tuned/misunderstood

Lack of developer security awareness

Threats and technologies have evolved since the application was designed/deployed/developed

Security Tools that are Paranoid/Badly Tuned/Misunderstood

Security testing and auditing tools, by their nature, have to be flexible and able to work in most environments and at various levels of paranoia. Because of this, if they are not configured and interpreted with the specifics of your application in mind they will often find a large number of issues, of which the majority are noise that should be ignored until the more important issues are fixed. If you have a serious, unauthenticated, SQL injection that exposes plain-text credit card and payment details, you probably shouldn’t a moment’s thought stressing about whether your website allows 4 or 5 failed logins before locking an account.

Lack of Developer Security Awareness

Developers are human (at least in my experience!), and have all the usual foibles of humanity. They are affected by business pressures to release first and fix bugs later, with the result that security bugs may be de-prioritized down as “no-one will find that” and so “later” never comes. Developers also are often taught about security as an addition rather than a core concept. For instance, when I was learning programming, I was first taught to construct SQL strings and verbatim webpage output and only much later to use parameterized queries and HTML encoding. As a result, even though I know better, I sometimes find myself falling into bad practices that could introduce SQL injection or cross-site scripting, as the practices that introduce these threats come more naturally to me than the secure equivalents.

Threats and Technologies have Evolved Since the Application was Designed/Deployed/Developed

To make it even harder to manage security, many legacy applications are developed in old technologies which are either unaware of security issues, have no way of dealing with them, or both. For instance, while SQL injection has been known about for around 15 years, and cross-site scripting a little less than that, some are far more recent, such as clickjacking and CSS history stealing.

When an application was developed without awareness of a threat, it is often more vulnerable to it, and when it was built on a technology that was less mature in approaching the threat remediating the issues can be far more difficult. For instance, try remediating SQL injection in a legacy ASP application by changing queries from string concatenation to parameterized queries (ADODB objects aren’t exactly elegant to use!).

Dealing with issues

Once you have found issues, then comes the daunting task of prioritizing, managing, and preventing their reoccurrence. This is the part that can bring the shock, and the part that can require the most care, as this is a task in managing complexity.

The response to issues requires not only looking at what you have found previously, but also what you have to do, and where you want to go. Breaking this down:

Understand the Past – Deal with existing issues

Manage the Present – Remedy old issues, prevent introduction of new issues where possible

Prepare for the Future – Expect new threats to arise

Understand the Past – Deal with Existing Issues

When dealing with security reports, it is important to always be psychologically and organizationally prepared for what you find. As already discussed, this is often unpleasant and the first reactions can lead to dangerous behaviors such as overreaction (“fire the person responsible”) or disillusionment (“we couldn’t possibly fix all that!”). The initial results may be frightening, but flight is not an option, so you need to fight.

To understand what you have in front of you, and to react appropriately, it is imperative that the person interpreting the results understands the tools used to develop the application; the threats surrounding the application; and the security tool and its results. If your organization is not confident in this ability, consider getting outside help or consultants (such as Neohapsis) in to explain the background and context of your findings.

Manage the present – Remedy old issues, prevent introduction of new issues where possible

Much like any software bug or defect, once you have an idea of what your overall results mean you should start making sense of them. This can be greatly aided through the use of a system (such as Neohapsis Security Manager) which can take vulnerability data from a large number of sources and track issues across time in a similar way to a bug tracker.

Issues found should then be dealt with in order of the threat they present to your application and organization. We have often observed a tendency to go for the vulnerabilities labeled as “critical” by a tool, irrespective of their meaning in the context of your business and application. A SQL injection bug in your administration interface that is only accessible by trusted users is probably a lot less serious than a logic flaw that allows users to order items and modify the price communicated and charged to zero.

Also, if required, your organization should rapidly institute training and awareness programs so that no more avoidable issues are introduced. This can be aided by integrating security testing into your QA and pre-production testing.

Prepare for the future – Expect new threats to arise

Nevertheless, even if you do everything right, and even if your developers do not introduce any avoidable vulnerabilities, new issues will probably be found as the threats evolve. To detect these, you need to regularly have security tests performed (both human and automated), keep up with the security state of the technologies in use, and have plans in place to deal with any new issues that are found.

Closing

It is not unusual to find a frightening degree of insecurity when you first bring your applications into the world of security testing, but diving back to hide is not prudent. Utilizing the right experience and tools can turn being afraid of your own shadow into being prepared for the changes to come. After all, if the cloud isn’t on the horizon for your company then you are probably already immersed in it.